Jobs Report Bloodbath

There Is Nothing Good Anywhere In The BLS Numbers

If we are lucky, the October Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is, to use a recently popularized term, “garbage”.

If we are lucky, there will be massive revisions, and those of a certain age will hear Gilda Radner squeaking out “Never mind!” (bonus points if you get the reference¹)

If we are not lucky, the October jobs report is telling us the jobs recession has gotten considerably worse.

The report itself was typically droll and understated.

Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in health care and government. Temporary help services lost jobs. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity.

Let that number sink in: According to the BLS, in all the United States, with all its 335+ millions of people, the economy expanded by only 12,000 jobs during the month of October.

That’s not just a “bad” jobs number. That’s a horrifically bad jobs number. If that number holds up, then we know that the jobs recession in which this country has languished for months has grown considerably worse.

Corrections is perhaps the best place to begin discussing the October jobs data, as we should hope there will be massive corrections to this month’s report.

The corrections are themselves not good news, as they entail significant downward revisions to the August and September data.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for August was revised down by 81,000, from +159,000 to +78,000, and the change for September was revised down by 31,000, from +254,000 to +223,000. With these revisions, employment in August and September combined is 112,000 lower than previously reported.

The August correction is especially ugly, as August had been revised up 17,000 jobs in September. Now on the October report the BLS is taking back that 17,000 jobs revision and then some.

The corrections follow a pattern within the BLS of making substantial revisions to the jobs data with little fanfare after the fact. However, subterfuge will not change the fact that the BLS has revised the 2024 employment data down by a total of 405,000 jobs throughout 2024.

So when Democrats brag about all the jobs the (Biden-)Harris Adminstration created, just remember that at least 405,000 of them never even existed.

Oops! Never mind!

Nor should we forget that, earlier in the summer, the BLS announced that 818,000 jobs from 2023 never existed.

And Just Like That, 818,000 Jobs Vanished

Oops! Never mind!

That seems to be the motto of the division of the BLS that compiles jobs data. They get it wrong, they get it wrong again, and then they hope no one is noticing.

If we’re lucky, they got the October jobs data way wrong. Unfortunately for the BLS jobs number crunchers, this time people are definitely noticing!

So let’s discuss the October data, and how ugly it is. Indeed, if ever there was a time when “fugly” was the appropriate adjective to use, this would be such a time.

First, we need to understand that when the BLS reported 12,000 jobs created in the whole of the economy, it included government jobs in that number. If we look at just private payrolls, the BLS reported a net job loss of 28,000.

Approximately 40,000 government jobs are the only reason there is a positive total jobs number this time.

The lack of growth was everywhere in the economy, with employment drying up in both goods-producing and service-producing sectors.

As we might expect from the job loss in goods producing sectors, manufacturing was decimated across the board.

While the Boeing strike accounts for the huge spike in transportation manufacturing job loss, nearly every other manufacturing sector experienced at least some job loss.

We have to remove the transportation sector to see just how bad 2024 has been for other manufacturing sectors, but when we do, we see that job loss is not something that just happened in October.

Virtually all year manufacturing has been shedding jobs.

If we index the payroll sizes for the various manufacturing sectors to January 2021, we find that between 2022 and 2023 the only two sectors which did not enter into a decline were Nonmetallic Mineral Product Manufacturing and Transportation Equipment.

I said last month manufacturing was hurting as a result of this jobs recession. This is how bad manufacturing is hurting.

The Jobs Recession: Manufacturing Is Suffering

We should also note that, while the unemployment rate itself remained at 4.1%, the ranks of the unemployed swelled by 150,000 last month.

While the unemployment rate did not change, there were 428,000 workers who exited the labor force in October.

Adding emphasis to the job losses was the reported absolute decline in full time employment of 164,000 workers.

Still, loss of full time jobs is not unique to October, nor even to 2024. Full time employment in the US has been on the decline for a year.

Of the approximately 3.9 million jobs beyond pre-COVID levels added during the (Biden-Harris) economy, since November of last year approximately 1.2 million (37%) of them have been lost, and we should pause to remember actual job growth under Kamala Harris has not been all that tremendous.

Not only is full time employment on the decline, however, but part time employment is unsurprisingly not picking up the slack.

If we index the part-time employment metrics to January 2023, we see that part time employment due to economic constraints has been rising for the better part of two years.

Workers are losing full time jobs, but the number of part time jobs available as replacements is nowhere near the amount needed to offset the loss of full time employment.

As if to add insult to injury, the number of multiple job holders also plunged by 354,000 workers.

Fewer full time jobs. Only a few more part time jobs. A decline in multiple job holders. Taken together they show a pretty steep drop off in overall employment.

Yet with the exception of the multiple job holders, these are trends which have been months and even years in the making. October is the worst month for job loss, but in several sectors it is not the first month.

This jobs recession has been around for quite some time now, dating back to last fall.

Even where there is employment, there is not always a lot of job to go with it. Specifically, throughout 2024 the average number of hours worked each week has been steadily on the decline.

While across the whole of the private sector the average work week hours held at 34.3, that number is stlill a good half an hour less than it was at the start of the (Biden-)Harris Administration.

Nor is the decline an isolated occurrence. Even among goods-producing jobs (long a mainstay of the full 2,000 hour work week, the number of hours worked each week is on the decline.

Index the average hours worked each week, and the decline becomes all too apparent.

The work week among service sector jobs has declined by more than 2% during Kamala Harris’ Reign of Error, and even among goods-producing jobs there has been a 1% decline.

Even when people have jobs, there is less “job” for them to have.

While hours worked is on the decline, the increase in the average hourly wage is not compensating. Overall the average hourly wage has increased between $0.05 and $0.20 per hour since 2021.

While an increase is always better than a decrease, if we index the hourly wage to January 2021 alongside the Consumer Price Index, we are reminded yet again that wages have NOT kept pace with inflation in this country.

Even on a weekly basis, the wages have not kept up.

With so much bad in the jobs report, the obvious question at this juncture is to ask “what happened”?

Certainly the BLS anticipated at least some of that questioning.

The strike at Boeing plants is what is being blamed for the steep drop in manufacturing of transporation equipment, and corporate media is certainly helping to carry that rationalization forward.

The manufacturing sector saw employment decline by 46,000 jobs in October, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted was largely due to strike activity in the transportation equipment manufacturing sector. About 33,000 unionized machinists at Boeing have been on strike since early September.

Indeed, CNBC essentially whitewashed the entire jobs report with the strike and the storms.

Job creation in October slowed to its weakest pace since late 2020 as the impacts of storms in the Southeast and a significant labor impasse dented the employment picture.

The Guardian also seemed prepared to accept strike and storm as the initial explanation for the horrific jobs report.

The US added just 12,000 jobs in October, the last snapshot of the employment market before election day, in a report heavily affected by the strike at Boeing and two recent hurricanes.

However, the Boeing strike only began in September. Manufacturing jobs across the board have been in decline all year long.

Boeing did not help matters, but manufacturing job loss did not start with Boeing and it will not end once the Boeing strike is resolved.

While Hurricanes Helene and Milton have undoubtedly scrambled employment in the southeastern United States, the most significant uptick in continuing claims for unemployment came in the last week of September—before the storms struck the United States.

While storm damage has most likely disrupted at least some claims processing, storm-related unemployment would be expected to have a much more visible impact on continued unemployment claims by now.

Additionally, when we look at the regional breakdown of the ADP National Employment Report, job loss in the region affected by the storms—East South Central—amounts to 13,000 jobs.

Finally, it must be noted that both the strike and the storms were known factors which Wall Street’s “experts” had been anticipating, yet they still predicted far more job creation than what the BLS reported.

Economists had expected the temporary impacts from Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton and the ongoing strike by 33,000 Boeing workers in the Pacific north-west to reduce job growth numbers in October. But the number of jobs created was far lower than their estimate of 120,000 jobs for the month.

As even CNBC acknowleged further down in their reporting, the BLS had pointed out that the storm impacts on jobs were not fully quantifiable at this juncture.

Along with that, the report noted the impact of hurricanes Helene and Milton but said “it is not possible to quantify the net effect” of the storms on the jobs total.

Boeing and Hurricanes Helene and Milton have certainly been bad news for jobs in the United States, but they are merely the latest blow to employment this country has endured. They are by no means the full explanation for the dumpster fire of employment reported by the BLS for October.

I have said this before, and I will say it again: America is experiencing a “jobs recession”.

There has been for months now a gathering crisis in employment—or, rather, in a lack of employment—that the BLS has glossed over in its Employment Situation Summary and which corporate media has doggedly done its level best to ignore.

Now that crisis cannot be ignored. No doubt many will try to rationalize it away. Corporate media already has begun to try to rationalize it away.

Was the report simply “noisy”, the victim of reporting glitches and failures exacerbated by weather effects? Certainly that is possible in states such as Georgia and North Carolina.

However, southern Florida has not been lashed by storms, and the rest of the United States has not been inundated with hurricanes and natural disasters. A labor strike might reduce employment, but it would not disrupt reporting systems and survey mechanisms used by the BLS to compile the Employment Situation Summary data.

Both strike and storm are recent events. They are not helpful to employment, but neither one had anything to do with manufacturing employment declines earlier in the year. Neither one had anything to do with declining full time employment going back into the fall of last year.

Neither impact caused the decline in average hours worked per week across all industries.

Nor does a “noisy” October report explain all the negative trends in the months preceding October. A “noisy” October report does not explain an economic assessment of a jobs recession in September. A “noisy” October report does not explain all the ways labor markets in this country have shown themselves to be extremely toxic over the past couple years.

This report was a bad report. The data within was beyond a shadow of a doubt “fugly.”

Yet this was only the worst report along a trend of deteriorating reports. This report shows the worst yet of several deteriorating conditions in labor markets.

Will Wall Street and Washington take note and finally realize that labor markets are not at all healthy in this country? Will Wall Street and Washington realize that their self-congratulatory preening over a “soft landing” for the economy after the 2022 hyperinflation cycle was a load of pigswallop?

They should, because that is exactly the takeaway one should have from this report.

I won’t hold my breath.

1. Gilda Radner, of course, was one of the original talents on Saturday Night Live, and created several memorable characters on that show, including “Emily Litella”, a vision and apparently hearing-impaired contributor to “Weekend Update.” Getting just about every fact of an issue wrong, upon being corrected, she closed every skit with “Never mind!”